Literature, Ezra Pound once said, is news that stays news. And for America’s state poets laureate, the news cycle has been churning since earlier this month, when Valerie Macon, North Carolina’s newly appointed laureate, resigned abruptly after an outcry from several of her predecessors.

To the former laureates and other detractors, Gov. Pat McCrory’s choice of Ms. Macon — a state disability examiner with two self-published books to her credit — was an outrageous end run around the selection process, if not a cynical prelude to abolishing the position altogether. To the governor, who chose Ms. Macon without the usual advice from the North Carolina Arts Council, critics of his choice were elitists full of “hostility and condescension.”

For the broader world of people who read poetry — and many who don’t — the brouhaha was a chance to ask a more basic question: Just who are America’s state poets laureate, and what do they do anyway?

States have official birds, rocks and trees. Increasingly, they also have official poets. According to a list maintained by the Library of Congress, 44 states and the District of Columbia have poet laureate or writer in residence positions, with a number dating only from the last two decades or so.

The craze isn’t just happening at the state level. Boston and Los Angeles, among other cities, have established posts in recent years, while a Google search for “county poet laureate” yields thousands of hits.

“I’ve been to places where there is a poet laureate for every ZIP code,” Billy Collins, a former United States and New York State laureate, said. “The country is crawling with them. I think it’s out of control.”

The national laureate position, which carries a $35,000 annual stipend, dates to 1937. The honoree is chosen by the Librarian of Congress solely on the basis of “poetic merit,” and has no responsibilities beyond the informal expectation that the poet speak at events opening and closing the library’s literary season.

Rob Casper, the head of the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress, traces the broader laureate boom to the rise in the early 1990s of so-called activist national laureates like Joseph Brodsky, who sought to have poetry books placed in every hotel room in America, and Rita Dove, who brought Crow Indian schoolchildren, young poets from Washington and dozens of others to read their work at the Library of Congress.

“It’s heartening to see the great proliferation of these positions,” Mr. Casper said. “It offers a welcome counterweight to the depressing stream of articles about the death of poetry.”

Today’s state laureates range from nationally known writers to those whose names ring few bells outside state lines. Laureateships, which are usually administered by independent arts groups or committees, receive modest stipends, if any (Wisconsin’s laureate, for example, receives only $2,000 in travel expenses), and are sometimes awarded through a selection process that asks candidates to describe their ideas for promoting the art form, by any means necessary.

In less populous states, that may mean barnstorming to places where poets are in short supply, giving readings and workshops at schools, prisons, military bases, homeless shelters, or, as Diane Raptosh, Idaho’s current writer in residence, once did, on a moving school bus.

“I just stood there with a mike like a lounge lizard, reading poems and leading haiku exercises,” Ms. Raptosh, who is also Boise’s former poet laureate, recalled.

In larger states, technology may help bridge the distance. After being named California’s laureate in 2012, Juan Felipe Herrera put out a call for contributions of lines and stanzas to “The Most Incredible and Biggest Poem on Unity in the World” via email, Facebook and Twitter. (Portions will be read at the California Unity Poem Fiesta, in Riverside, in October.)

Mr. Herrera, a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets with more than two dozen books to his name, has also organized a project called i-Promise Joanna, which sends local poets into schools to help students shape their feelings about bullying into collective expression.

The position “has forced me to let go of some of my literary biases,” he said. Poets today “have to float and be transparent and pick up everything we can.”

Some laureates still receive old-fashioned requests to compose verse for graduations, hospital openings and other public occasions. For the reopening of the renovated Bay Bridge last year, Mr. Herrera wrote a Whitmanesque tribute to the people behind the bridge’s beauty. (“Architects engineers laborers drivers Viva!/Lifters callers crane operators Viva!/Cement mixers cable threaders Viva!”)

For Boise’s 150th anniversary, Ms. Raptosh composed three poems on set themes, including one on community that included lines in Spanish and Somali, along with nods to regional slang (“It’s Friday in Boise. It is,/as the kids say, hella hot.”)

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Valerie Macon resigned as the poet laureate of North Carolina earlier this month.CreditDepartment of Cultural Resources, via Associated Press

Such commissions can have their awkward aspects, although few end as badly as the three-year effort by Nevada’s inaugural laureate, Mildred Breedlove (1904-94), to write an epic poem about the state, which culminated in her threats to leave Nevada after the government declined to distribute it broadly. (“I am so bitter than my very soul suffered corrosion,” she wrote in 1968.)

Mr. Collins recalled the phone call in 2002, when he was national laureate, asking him to write a poem to be read before a joint session of Congress on the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

“They said I could do what I wanted, but then a voice chimed in and said, ‘Please mention the first responders and their heroic job, and oh, also say something positive about the future of the country,’ ” he said. The poem he eventually wrote, “The Names,” was a spare elegy for the victims, organized around the alphabet.

Even less charged commissions can be tricky. Sue Brannan Walker, who was Alabama’s laureate from 2003 to 2012, recalled being asked to write a poem for a social studies textbook that would mention various state features, including the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville. “You can always talk about flying to the moon,” she said. “That part was easier than writing about Alabama agriculture.”

Other laureates have taken the tradition of occasional poetry in a more personalized direction. As part of the Poetry in Motion project’s Springfest, an event held in Grand Central Terminal in April, Marie Howe, the New York State laureate, organized The Poet Is In, a project inspired by Lucy Van Pelt’s advice booth in “Peanuts.”

A series of poets, including Tina Chang, Brooklyn’s laureate, each sat with a typewriter and three-minute egg timer, and invited passers-by to sit down and talk about an object hidden behind an imagined secret doorway, or a dream they had had. The poets then banged out verse inspired by the imagery, and read it out loud to the sitter.

Many people “would just cry,” Ms. Howe said. “A lot of the poets did, too. It was a kind of communion.”

Ms. Macon’s brief tenure in North Carolina can be seen as just another chapter in the long-running debate over whose standards should rule the art form. In her letter of resignation, she said that people didn’t need “prestigious publishing credits or a collection of accolades from impressive organizations” to read or write poetry.

Ms. Howe, who teaches at Columbia, New York University and Sarah Lawrence, said she had seen too little of Ms. Macon’s work to comment on her appointment, but sympathized with the sentiment.

“The academic establishment, which I’m very much part of, has this idea of a poem as a monument, and I bow to that idea,” Ms. Howe said. “But there are poems that are valuable without being monuments.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Is Poetry Dead? Not if 45 Official Laureates Are Any Indication. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe